gms | German Medical Science

Jahrestagung der Gesellschaft für Medizinische Ausbildung (GMA)

05.10. - 08.10.2011, München

Self-assessment of clinical teachers compared to evaluation by students

Vortrag

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  • author Teresa Campbell - Charité - Univeristätsmedizin Berlin, Berlin, Germany
  • corresponding author presenting/speaker Jan Breckwoldt - Charité - Universitätsmedizin Berlin, Dieter Scheffner Fachzentrum, Berlin, Germany

Jahrestagung der Gesellschaft für Medizinische Ausbildung (GMA). München, 05.-08.10.2011. Düsseldorf: German Medical Science GMS Publishing House; 2011. Doc11gma037

doi: 10.3205/11gma037, urn:nbn:de:0183-11gma0373

Published: September 26, 2011

© 2011 Campbell et al.
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/deed.en). You are free: to Share – to copy, distribute and transmit the work, provided the original author and source are credited.


Outline

Text

Question: Educational psychologists claim that self-assessment is important for lifelong learning, especially for complex skills like clinical teaching [1]. This competence might improve with increasing teaching experience, but it could also be related to teaching quality. Therefore we wanted to analyse, how the self-assessment of clinical teachers is related to their teaching experience, and to their quality of teaching.

Methods: We assessed clinical teachers after a lesson of 50 min in emergency medicine, delivered to 5-6 students. At the end of the session teachers evaluated themselves by a teaching quality questionnaire and were also evaluated by their students by a questionnaire covering the same fields of competencies. Questionnaires were based on an empirically based check list for teaching quality covering 8 different fields. In respect to teaching experience, teachers were classified as: ‘novice’ (0-1 year), ‘intermediate’ (2-7 years), or ‘experienced’ (>8 years). In respect to teaching quality, teachers were divided into quartiles according to students’ evaluation questionnaire.

Result: 75 lessons were evaluated by a total of 409 students. From a total of 43 teachers, 15 were ‘novices’, 21 ‘intermediates’, and 7 ‘experienced’. The teachers generally estimated their teaching quality lower than the students did, but correlation was fairly good.

The ‘novice’, ‘intermediate’ and ‘experienced’ groups did not significantly differ in their self-assessment, but the evaluation by students showed higher ratings for teachers with less experience in all 8 studied fields.

If teachers were analysed according to their teaching quality, those who performed best (1st quartile) underestimated themselves whilst the lowest performers (4th quartile) overestimated themselves.

Conclusion: The ability for consistent self-assessment of clinical teachers was generally high. The competency was not associated with years of teaching experience but rather with the students’ assessment of teaching quality [2].


References

1.
Claridge JA, Calland JF, Chandrasekhara V, Young JS, Sanfey H, Schirmer BD. Comparing resident measurements to attending surgeon self-perceptions of surgical educators. Am J Surg. 2003;185(4):323-327. DOI: 10.1016/S0002-9610(02)01421-6 External link
2.
Davis DA, Mazmanian PE, Fordis M, Van Harrison R, Thorpe KE, Perrier L. Accuracy of Physician Self-assessment Compared With Observed Measures of Competence. JAMA. 2006;296(9):1094-102. DOI: 10.1001/jama.296.9.1094 External link